***
The sheer curtains in the tiny bedroom blocked out none of the morning light and I woke early. I lay listening to the rain peppering the tin roof, caught in a perfect moment, tangled around him, listening to him breathe as he slept beside me.
My head rested uncomfortably in the crook of his arm but I didn’t care. Every other part of my body felt blissful – heavy and weightless at the same time. I would have floated to the ceiling if his arms weren’t around me. His hold on me didn’t waver as I twisted to see his face. Tracing a light line around his lips with my fingers made him flinch, enough to loosen his grip but not enough to wake him. He murmured my name – not the shortened, preferred version but the extended, ridiculous version that was more suited to a character from a Jane Austen novel.
“Are you awake?” I whispered.
The silence made my heart fly. He’d whispered my name in his sleep. Running my hand down the length of his arm made him move just enough to free me.
Moving slowly and quietly, I gathered my clothes and made my way to the bathroom.
My overnight bag hadn’t made it out of the car, and everything I needed to make myself look human was in it. Fossicking through Gabrielle’s cabinets looking for a hairbrush seemed more intrusive than going through her handbag, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
A bag of toiletries on the counter brought me a little hope. Obviously it wasn’t Gabrielle’s. The black leather bag contained everything from razor blades to cologne that reminded me of him – even without smelling it. The small comb I found had no hope of making it through my hair so I gave up, repacked the bag and repositioned it on the counter, hoping it looked as it had before.
Determined to elevate my status to smug but pretty, I headed to the car to retrieve my bag. But the mission was all but forgotten when the sound of the ocean pounding on the base of the cliff distracted me. Some days it couldn’t be heard from the house and other days the waves were deafening. This day was different, a happy medium. Even without seeing them I knew the waves were rhythmic and slow.
I walked across the back lawn. The minute I saw the surf I was sold. I wondered if leaving would be misconstrued as regret if he woke and I wasn’t there.
Glancing around quickly to make sure I was alone, I dropped the towel and dragged on my wetsuit, which had a permanent home in my car. The overgrown trees lining the side boundary shielded me from anyone lurking in the neighbouring garden – an unlikely scenario considering the early hour. I dragged my brush through my hair before pulling it into a messy bun.
Carrying my board under one arm and everything else with the other, I stumbled barefooted down the crude track to the beach. Gabrielle was spoiled rotten by the easy access, yet I couldn’t remember ever seeing her down there.
Standing ankle deep in the icy water, I couldn’t help turning to look up at the house perched on the cliff to make sure it was still there. Shaking all thoughts of him from my head, I refocused on the ocean. The dark water, greyed by the overcast sky, crashed in slowly. The rain had dulled to a light sprinkle that I couldn’t even feel.
“Charli Blake,” called a smooth voice from somewhere behind me.
I didn’t turn around. I didn’t need to. I knew exactly who it was. If there was a chance the little cottage on the hill might disappear in a puff of smoke this would have been the time.
“Mitchell Tate.” I tried to keep my voice even.
“Did you miss me?” He sounded closer, right behind me.
I shrugged my shoulders as I worked on my lie. “Were you gone?”
“Aren’t you going to look at me?” I could hear the smile in his voice.
I saw him in my head. Scrappy shoulder length sandy blonde hair bleached by the sun, broad shoulders and a year-round tan that his sisters would have killed for.
Turning around, I paced the few feet necessary to get back to the water’s edge. Nothing was said for a few seconds and I made no secret of the fact I was staring at him. The unkempt blonde hair was gone, replaced by a short buzz cut. Other than that, nothing had changed. He was just as I remembered him. Tall, tanned and handsome. Mitchell loathed the Beautifuls moniker, yet he was the only one who deserved the title.
“Where have you been, Mitch?” I asked, working to sound casual.
He clasped his hands, blowing a warm breath into his clenched fists before launching into his reply. “Everywhere. South Africa, Bali, Tahiti, California – ”
“So why did you come back?” I cut him off. I got the impression his list of conquered surf beaches was long.
“Ethan’s back too. It was time,” he said simply. His grin was infectious and I smiled at him for the first time. “You look good, Charli.”
There was a time when I wanted to hear him say it – but he never did. It was too late now.
“When did you get back?”
“A few days ago.” His smile didn’t waver.
“And you’re down here already? You must be keen.”
“I knew you’d be here. I wanted to see you but I wasn’t expecting such a chilly reception.” He raised one eyebrow, shooting me a look that once upon a time would have dropped me to the floor. Now it just annoyed me.
“What were you expecting, Mitchell?”
A nervous laugh hitched in his throat. “I’m not sure.”
“I don’t think there’s much to say. I laid it all on the line before you left, remember?”
Every bit of rejection I’d felt that day flooded back. Making the decision to change a friendship comes with the risk of losing everything. Alex claimed that I had a high tolerance for risk. Seeing Mitchell standing in front of me reminded me that it rarely worked in my favour.
“You were barely sixteen, Charli. Alex would have killed me.”
“I can still arrange for him to do that,” I said seriously.
“Are you still mad?” A grin crossed his face again as he rocked back on his heels.
“I don’t even think about you.” I punched out my words but he overlooked the harshness.
“I’ve thought about you every day.”
“You never even wrote, Mitchell, never called, nothing. Your sisters didn’t even know where you were most of the time,” I hissed through my teeth.
“So you did ask about me,” he said triumphantly.
Frustration overtook me. I scowled, pushing past him to pick up my bag and board. “We’re done,” I said, walking away.
I could feel his eyes pulling me back, willing me to turn around, but I held strong, refusing to look back at him. I was almost at the beginning of the trail when he called out again.
“Would it have made a difference, if I’d written to you?”
“No!”
I don’t know how long he stood there. Not once did I turn back to check. Mitchell Tate was not a complication I planned on spending time thinking about.
A strange kind of nervousness fizzed inside me as I approached the cottage, dissolving the euphoria I’d felt when I woke. It hardly seemed fair. Mitchell had blown back in to town after being absent for over a year as if nothing had changed. Everything had changed.
Sneaky, underhanded and more than capable of stretching the truth were all fair statements when it came to describing myself. They were not attributes to be proud of but it was an angle I’d worked for a long time. I didn’t want to take that road with Adam. He deserved more from me. Telling him that Mitchell Tate was back in town before he heard it from anyone else was the only option I had.
Dumping my gear on the porch, I brushed as sand off my feet as best I could before pushing the door open. The squeaky floorboards made creeping through the house impossible but there was no need. He leaned on the archway that separated the kitchen from the dining room, nursing a cup of coffee, smiling as if it had been months since we’d seen each other.
“You weren’t gone long,” he noted. “I thought I would have lost you for hours.”
Ordinarily he would have. The waves that morning w
ere faultless. I could have wasted an entire morning in the water and not felt a wisp of guilt. Instead, I had run back to the house after less than half an hour feeling as guilty as sin.
“I have to tell you something,” I said bleakly.
So much for easing into it.
Adam’s hand, warm from the mug, moved under my chin and tilted my head, giving me no option but to look at him. I stared at him for too long, desperately trying to string a sentence together in my head.
“It must be important if you abandoned the beach,” he said.
I looked to the ceiling – preparing to be struck down at any second as I launched into my confession the only way I knew how, bluntly. “Mitchell Tate was on the beach. He’s back in town.”
Adam leaned back to look at me, only loosening his grip on my waist slightly, staring for a long time.
“Does that news change something, Charlotte?” he asked finally. He didn’t look bothered in the slightest.
I fervently shook my head. “Nothing,” I promised.
“Good. So neither of us need to waste another minute talking about it,” he murmured, leaning in for the kill.
That was too easy, I thought – easier than I deserved, anyway. I don’t know what reaction I was expecting. Mitchell meant nothing to Adam, which was exactly how it should have been. In a less complicated, less smashed up world, he would have meant nothing to me either.
Adam’s hand trailed a line up my back, reaching for the zipper at my neck. It crackled as he slid it down, stopping when he reached the end of the line at the small of my back. I backed away. I had no qualms about him seeing me naked – playing coy after last night would have been absurd – but getting out of a wetsuit is about as elegant as trying to squeeze into jeans two sizes too small. “Hold that thought,” I instructed him, and slipped away to the bathroom.
I stood under the shower too long, letting the water run over my head. I didn’t expect Adam to walk in but wasn’t unhappy when he did. I cleared the foggy shower screen with my hand, smiling at him through the temporarily clear patch of glass.
“I just got a phone call,” he announced, waving his phone at nothing in particular. “I’ve been waiting all week for a parcel and Mrs Daintree just called to let me know she’s holding it at the post office.”
Holding it to ransom more likely. The Daintrees ran the post office and adjoining souvenir shop, and Valerie Daintree was as nosey as Carol Lawson. She’d probably demand to know the contents of the package before she handed it over.
“Do you want me to come with you?” I asked. “Val is a scary woman.”
His laugh echoed. “There are a lot of scary women in this town, Charlotte. I think I can handle her. Besides, Nicole called too. She wants you to go to the café. She said it was urgent.”
Of course it was urgent. Nicole would have been champing at the bit to break it to me that Mitchell was back in town. Truthfully, I wanted to see her too. Even if I hadn’t, going to the café was still preferable to fronting up at the post office with Adam.
It turned out that Adam had a few errands to run that morning, all boat related and boring, so we took our own cars with the vague plan of meeting somewhere in the middle later.
For the first time ever I was actually glad that my car lost the capability of hitting the speed limit somewhere back in the eighties. I was in no hurry to reach the café, already knowing what I was in for when I got there.
Nicole didn’t disappoint, meeting me at the door before the bell had even stopped jingling. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, reaching for the sleeve of my coat and pulling me through the door.
“Why? What’s the emergency?” I asked, pretending to look around for signs of fire or some other catastrophic event.
“No emergency. Look, I know I promised Alex I’d be here today but something’s come up.”
The wicked smile that crept across her face was not one I saw often. Her plans for the day didn’t involve working. And I’d been wrong about the reason for wanting to see me. Mitchell had nothing to do with it.
“Ethan?” I asked.
She nodded. “And Ethan had something to do with the offer you got yesterday afternoon, right before you ditched me?” She continued nodding through my entire sentence, looking nowhere near as contrite as she should have. “Why didn’t you just tell me they were back in town?”
“I didn’t think you’d appreciate the distraction,” she said wryly. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Oh, and by the way, remember when Jasmine told you that you had no idea what was coming? Well, I just found out what she meant by that.’”
As much as I hated to admit it, she was right.
It was inevitable that Nicole would gravitate back to Ethan the minute he hit town, even knowing he was wrong for her. He knew he was never going to be the one she was looking for. To her credit, she had made that very clear. Ethan knew exactly where he stood, which probably explained why there were no tears when he left town. Nicole used her time with Ethan like a practice for the real thing. Unlike me, she had always expected true love to be blinding and fierce. I’d laughed when she first told me that she’d know the instant she found the one for her. I wouldn’t laugh now.
“I’ll stay. You go,” I said unwillingly. But it wasn’t as if I had anything better to do. Adam wouldn’t be back for ages. Valerie Daintree could hold him against his will for hours.
“You’re sure?” Her words implied I had a choice but she was already reaching for her bag and coat.
“Yeah. Go.”
The second I’d finished speaking, Ethan walked through the door, and judging by the dumb grin on his face, he’d been waiting in the wings the whole time. “All set?” she asked, too enthusiastic to appear casual.
He nodded.
“Ethan. Hi,” I said, a little too loudly, to compensate for the fact that I was invisible.
“How are you, Charli? You look good.” He hadn’t even looked at me.
Ethan hadn’t changed much in the past year. His hair was longer than he used to wear it, which made me wonder why Mitchell’s was so severely short. It bugged me that I’d even made the comparison. I did not want to spend a single second of my time thinking about Mitchell Tate. Ethan was quite short, not much taller than me and about the same height as Nicole. He shared the same physique as most surfers, stock standard for any boy who spent hours a day cutting through water with his arms.
Nicole asked me one more time if I was sure I wanted to stay, already halfway out the door when she asked the question.
Manning the café on the first morning of my weekend alone with Adam seemed nothing less than sabotage. I wasn’t sure if Nicole was the culprit or if I was the one to blame. I’d browsed through most of her contraband magazine collection by the time the bell at the top of the door finally jingled.
Floss Davis’s large frame shuffled through the door and I grinned, truly thrilled to see her. “Hello, love,” she beamed, walking towards the counter in her usual slow manner.
“Where have you been, Floss?”
It had been days since I’d seen her, and that was almost unheard of. I’d been lying low, but it was still unusual to go so long without seeing her somewhere around town.
“Well, we went on a whirlwind tour of the big smoke a week or so ago, up to Adelaide for a few days,” she explained.
“Oh, nice,” I purred. “That Norm sure knows how to treat a girl right.”
Floss looked confused. “It wasn’t Norm’s idea. It was that lovely boy of yours.”
“Adam?” I asked incredulously.
Floss’s eyes darted around as if she was looking for an escape route. “I assumed he would have told you, considering he’s already given it to you,” she said, pointing to my necklace.
“Told me what?” I demanded, clutching the black pendant at my throat.
“Oh, Charli, I’m not sure if – ”
“Just tell me, please.”
“He commissioned me to make tha
t necklace for you. He had very specific ideas about what he wanted. It had to be a black opal. There was no way I’d buy a black opal sight unseen.” She huffed out a breath at the end as if it was the most ludicrous idea on earth. “I told him the only place to buy such a stone would be from a reputable dealer on the mainland. He told me to do whatever I needed. Norm and I had a fabulous three-day, all expenses paid trip to Adelaide, and tracked down the most spectacular black opal I’ve ever seen. Don’t you think it’s a stunner?”
I nodded, astonished by her tale.
Once Floss started talking, there was no shutting her up. I continued nodding as she went on to explain the characteristics of the perfect black opal but truthfully I was only half listening – until she mentioned Norm’s fabulous negotiating skills.
“It took some wheeling, he wanted over six thousand for it initially. I got him down to five and a half thanks to Norm. He always was good at bargaining,” she said proudly.
Adam had assured me it was a cheap trinket. A five and a half thousand dollar opal was no cheap trinket.
“What’s the setting, Floss? What’s the chain made of?”
“Platinum,” she said, grinning at me. “I’ve never worked with platinum before.”
Of course she hadn’t. Floss crafted semiprecious jewellery out of metals like nickel and silver. And I’d actually taken my pendant off before showering, worried that the cheap metal would make my skin turn green.
I needed to sit down. I was mortified by my own naivety, but mostly I was angry. Since when has jewellery worth thousands of dollars been an appropriate gift for me? I didn’t deserve it. I hardly felt that I deserved him most of the time.
I was beginning to realise that Alex was right. I knew nothing important about Adam Décarie and it was time I started asking questions. The minute Floss was out of sight, I took the necklace off, burying it deep in the pocket of my jeans.
Even if my ridiculously extravagant black opal had spontaneously combusted, it wouldn’t have come close to the discomfort I felt half an hour later when Lily Tate and Lisa Reynolds sauntered through the door, followed by Jasmine.
It was the first time the trinity of Beautifuls had been seen in public for a week. Any plans I had of serving them quickly and sending them on their way were dashed when they sat down. They hardly ever ordered in unless they were in the mood for tormenting my brother with an hour of flirty innuendos while they pretended to drink coffee.
“What do you want?” I asked from the relative safety of behind the counter.
“Customer service really isn’t your forte, Charli. You should work on that,” said Jasmine in a syrupy tone that must have taken hours of practice to master. Lily and Lisa giggled, a piercing shrill that reminded me of fingers scraping down a blackboard – a feat none of them were capable of considering they were all still wearing gloves. I tapped my pen on the counter.
“Two cappuccinos and a skim milk latte,” said Jasmine in her superior tone.
I stared at her blankly like I didn’t understand her order.
“Do you need to write it down?” she asked, making the other two girls giggle again.
“No. I’ve got it,” I replied dryly.
Ignoring them was impossible. The whispered comments seemed louder than the fake casual conversation they threw in for effect, even over the sound of the coffee machine. It wasn’t until I took their coffees to the table that they spoke directly to me.
“What’s this?” asked Jasmine sourly.
“It’s what you ordered,” I said, pointing to the cups in front of her. “Three flat whites.”
“You are so stupid,” said Lily. She didn’t say it meanly, it sounded more apologetic. I smiled at her, safe in the knowledge that I wasn’t the stupid one.
“Did you hear the news, Charli?” asked Lisa. Her friendly tone offered false comfort. I held the empty tray to my chest like a shield. I had a feeling I was about to need it.
“Does it matter? You’re going to tell me anyway.” My childishness was beginning to echo theirs, which added weight to my theory. If you hung around them for any length of time, there was a chance you’d turn into one of them.
“Mitchy is back in town.”
As usual, Jasmine was the spokesperson for the group. I wondered if rank was based on age or hair colour.
“I know,” I replied, wondering how he’d react to being called Mitchy.
“How could you know? He only just got back,” spat Lisa.
“I saw him on the beach this morning.”
Lisa’s face crumpled and I realised there was a new game in play. It had only taken Lisa a few days to set her sights on Mitchell Tate, no doubt with the full support and encouragement of his sisters.
“I told him to stay away from you,” snarled Lily.
“Good. I hope he listens,” I said, making my way back to the counter.
More muted whispers followed before Jasmine spoke again. “It’s our birthday soon. We’re having a huge party. We’ve organised everything. It’s black tie.”
It was hard enough to get Mitchell to wear shoes, let alone a suit and tie. The Beautifuls used any excuse to get dressed up, and a birthday party was obviously a prime opportunity, even if one of the guests of honour was sure to hate it.
“Why are you telling me?”
“We have to tell you about it. It’s not like you’ll be there to see it for yourself,” replied Lily.
“Thank goodness for small mercies,” I muttered.
The Beautifuls stopped talking to me when they realised I wasn’t taking the bait. Their irritating banter slowly faded to background noise. The only time I looked up was to serve the odd customer that came through the door. I had four in an hour, and the day was dragging.
The Beautifuls still showed no signs of leaving when the telltale bell at the top of the door jingled.
“Mitchell!” shrieked Lisa, launching herself at him. Snaking her arms around his waist, she squeezed him tightly.
“Hey, Lisa,” he mumbled, prising her off. He stared at me the whole time, paying no attention to Lisa who was unashamedly trying to maintain her grip on him.
“Sit with us,” instructed Jasmine, pulling out a chair.
“In a minute.” He was walking towards the counter.
“What do you want?” My tone was cutting but, as usual, he ignored it.
“To see you.”
I felt my heart unfairly skip. “I’m busy,” I lied.
“What time do you finish?”
“I’m busy then too, Mitchell.”
“I’ll wait. We need to talk.” He leaned too far across the counter as he spoke and I instinctively took a step back.
From the corner of my eye I had enough vision to see the Beautifuls hanging on every word. It was an impossible conversation and I hated being pushed into having it in front of an audience.
“We talked this morning,” I hissed.
“No. I tried talking to you this morning and you walked away from me.” His voice was low and muted but our audience missed nothing.
“There’s nothing to discuss. Leave.” My voice sounded strange, like I was trying to whisper and yell at the same time.
“Fine,” he said, shrugging. “We’ll talk later.”